Twin Forks

A friend of mine once suggested that all music has its proper season and I’m inclined to believe him. Case in point: the folksy vibe of Twin Forks makes their music very appealing to me this time of year when everything is pumpkin-flavored and harvest-themed. There’s something warm and comforting in the band’s use of male-female harmony, group claps, and mandolin. It all so seasonal. It just feels like fall.

They sound like this looks.

Twin Forks is fronted by Chris Carrabba who’s all over BQDC at the moment and who is best known from his time at the front of Dashboard Confessional and Further Seems Forever. If, like me, you’re best acquainted with Carrabba’s voice from early-2000s albums like The Moon Is Down and The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most you’ll be surprised to hear no such vocals in the Twin Forks oeuvre. Carrabba’s not the same youthful, high flying tenor that he once was. His voice is older now and it shows. It’s gravelly and weathered and generally sounds like it has seen some shit. It’s a voice that wouldn’t have worked on the pop and prog-rock albums that first introduced me to Carrabba. But folk music? In a genre that embraced the voices of Dylan and Waits, Carrabba’s new timbre fits right in.

You’ve got two options if you’re looking to pick up a Twin Forks album: a self-titled five song EP and an equally self-titled twelve track full-length (it seems that Twin Forks is not particularly creative when it comes to album titles). Despite the fact that all five EP tracks appear on the full-length and even though the remainder of the full-length is enjoyable, the EP is probably the best place to start. Its five songs are arguably the band’s best with ‘Back to You’ and ‘Scraping Up the Pieces’ standing out as particularly strong tracks; each has a strong melody, a festively peppy groove, and appropriately endearing lyrics.

The truth is that I was hesitant to embrace any Carrabba project after years of Dashboard albums that weren’t interesting to me and the hot mess that was Further Seems Forever’s reunion album, Penny Black. But here I am, embracing a Carrabba project, enjoying Twin Forks and all its folksy goodness. The band hasn’t really done anything new or particularly original but what it does it does well. And that’s something that I can support.